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To be fair, Thomsons have celebrated their 70th year with the latest hardback book Beano and Dandy: Crazy About Creatures but it would have been good to see the comic mention it.
My guess is that perhaps management see Dandy Xtreme as a new up-to-date title and didn't want to put off kewl kidz with a nostalgic article. Even so, a little blurb saying something like "The original Dandy started 70 years ago this week. Just proves old stuff can be cool too." would be better than nothing. Then again that sounds very cheesy so maybe they made the right choice.
Sadly I think you're right Lew. It's a contradiction in terms to equate 'old stuff' with being 'cool' certainly if you're trying to sell it as such to kids.
To be fair I can't remember what my attitude to 'old stuff' was when I, myself, was a kid, and certainly not what my response was to celebrating 'great' age as a positive thing in itself. Off the top of my head the only big birthdays that comics had in the 1960's were the Dandy and Beano getting to their 1000th issues and their 25th anniversaries and I was too young to experience any of them first hand.
And it has to be admitted that, a decade earlier, in the case of the Amalgamated Press' two giant comic titles Comic Cuts and Chips neither of them acknowledged their sixtieth birthday as far as I know (although my memory could be a fault here) and poor old Chips was allowed to be amalgamated with Film Fun a tantalizing three issues short of its 3000th issue. So maybe a certain degree of pragmatic cynicism has always been the norm.
Though when i was young, i'd buy old 70's and 80's humour comic annuals at car boot sales. I don't think i really thought much about the age of them, it was just more comic to read XD. Did feel a bit odd having annuals in March though, they where "christmas" things XD. I also started getting those hardcover books of reprints along with the annuals for christmas when they started coming out...
Kashgar wrote:
To be fair I can't remember what my attitude to 'old stuff' was when I, myself, was a kid, and certainly not what my response was to celebrating 'great' age as a positive thing in itself.
I loved reprints of old comics when I was a kid. Marvel's Fantasy Masterpieces (reprinting 1940s Captain America etc) was my favourite Marvel comic when I was eight. And The Penguin Book of Comics in 1971 (when I was 12) was a voyage of discovery into the history of comics.
Unfortunately I suspect that we're the odd ones out and that most kids today hate "old stuff". In that case perhaps the little brats could stop using the 1960s phrase "cool" every five minutes then.
My favourite 'annual' when I was a kid was probably the Broons book for 1956 that I picked up at a jumble sale, and it was published before I was born. I positively relished it's 'old' style and the sheer density of Watkins' artwork with every frame crammed with figures deftly drawn by DDW at his best. And it wasn't half funny too.
Jumble sale 'beachcombing' was always a joy for picking up comic gems from years gone by. So in that sense I did certainly appreciate the past.
